


don't come closer, don't let go of me

by youatemytailor



Series: unfinished business [1]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: M/M, a conversation on the way to savannah, a post-mortem of sorts, flint being philosophical, i dont know what to say, i thought flint would be angry on the way to savannah but my brain had other ideas, im drowning over him mate, lots of silver backstory talk, silverflint, specifically lots of john silver feelings, they love each other and im desperately sad, this is just a way for me to work through my feelings guys i've got a lot of them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-25 20:00:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10771395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youatemytailor/pseuds/youatemytailor
Summary: "Why are you here?"Convinced it would look too much like startlement, Silver does not let his eyes shift downwards at the sound of Flint's voice. He watches the displaced dust around the rafters above, instead, swirling in the air as men walk overhead."Ben mentioned you were refusing your rations," Silver says. His voice is too hoarse.Flint's is horrifyingly flat. "So?""So, I'd really rather you not die. Not now, not when we’re so close."





	don't come closer, don't let go of me

**Author's Note:**

> If you would like a post 410 update of my life, I'm still dying, my dudes. This is a way to work through my feelings. Lots of love and thanks to Cait, who allowed me to shower her with my endless suffering while I wrote this. This show and this fandom have been a blessing and a curse all rolled into one. I now have at least 400% more emotions about everything than I did six months ago. Anyway, please try to enjoy this if you can.
> 
> Title from Porcelain by Skott. I recommend listening to it while you read this, and I staunchly advise against it at the same time.

Flint hasn't eaten in three days. 

Ordinarily, Silver wouldn't bat an eye. Men at sea were no strangers to hunger. If anything it was their natural state; hunger for food, for plunder, for power, for all three at once. And _Flint_ , well. The proclivity towards superstition still grated on Silver more than any other pirate tradition but honestly he's beginning to believe the legend himself; nothing will kill Flint. Not starvation, attempted mutiny, a hanging, dead weather, or dead lovers. 

A living one, though. That remained to be seen.

Silver has been avoiding it. Seeing Flint. Busying himself with the pretence of charting their course to Savannah since their departure from the island, though Jack and the whole crew besides were well aware that Silver had no exceptional skills as a seaman or navigator. Hell, he’d just as likely dash them against some shallows by mistake if left to his own devices. Still, they were all by turns too afraid or too tired to protest the length of time he spent holed up in his cabin, poring over maps unseeing. It was strangely soothing, pretending to be useful over the course of this voyage. Vital, even, in a way Silver did not want to think too hard about. This senseless ritual had persisted more or less undisturbed until news of Flint’s most recent protest had reached Silver’s ears. 

Flint refusing his rations. Flint letting himself fucking wither away rather than live long enough to prove Silver right. At least, long enough to prove Silver to be _true_. 

And isn't that just fucking typical? Silver should have seen it coming. Everything on Flint's terms, even in surrender. Dragged kicking and screaming into the light. 

So be it.

Silver makes his way through the ship, now, down the decks and towards the hold, the air thickening around him as he goes. He feels as if he’s steadily walking towards the sun. Condensation presses more heavily into his neck with every step, the sharp scent of salt stinging the inside of his nose. The crutch feels slippery and unreliable in his hand. He grips it tighter, the last thing he can afford at the moment is to fall on his face in front of an entire crew of strangers. 

It occurs to him as he cuts through the mess hall - unfamiliar eyes in unfamiliar heads turning to watch his every move - that he does not have much in the way of a plan of what to do once he actually _gets_ to Flint. There's a strange helplessness that comes with that, and Silver is unaccustomed to it. He supposes he could force-feed Flint. The idea turns Silver's stomach the second it materialises and he discards it immediately. Perhaps he could annoy Flint into eating, convince him to survive on the promise that he'd be able to spit out a few more scathing indictments against Silver’s character if he were to live. That he'd be able to darkly prophesize Silver’s bleak future for a little while longer if he would just  _eat._

That sounded like a more viable course of action. Christ, knowing Flint, there was a good chance it would actually work. 

After an age, Silver reaches the door leading to the hold and pauses, listening. Nothing, but the creaking of the ship, the crew shouting above deck, his own heavy breathing against the wood. Taking a steadying gulp of breath that is more parts heat than air, he uses the crutch to edge the door open.

There's only darkness at first, until Silver's eyes adjust and there's Flint, seated in the far corner on an upturned barrel of rum. His wrists and ankles are bound in iron, chains pooled around his feet and fixed into the floor. The sight drops heavy into Silver's gut; there was a reason he'd been delaying this and it had nothing to do with the suffocating heat of the hold. Blood has crusted black around the pale skin of Flint’s wrists. Silver swallows around the sickening lump rising in his throat.

The only source of light is the two lanterns swinging slowly overhead. Silver sees Flint in pieces; his downturned shoulders, the gentle rise and fall of his back, the nape of his neck. For a brief, merciful moment, Flint is so motionless that he appears asleep. Relief flares wide in Silver's chest. He dares to hope that the exhaustion Flint has been trying desperately to hide these past few months - since the start of the war, since Silver's fucking _known_ him - has finally caught up after a relentless pursuit. 

The urge to leave Flint undisturbed rears its head uninvited and overwhelming. Followed closely by something that tastes an awful lot like disappointment in the tight recess of Silver's throat. Flint hasn’t eaten in three days and Silver hasn’t spoken a word to him for twice as long. It feels unfathomable, even as it is happening; the rest of Silver's days stretching out ahead, devoid of Flint's voice. A fucking lifetime, yawning forward without. The trickle of panic that Silver had chosen to steadfastly ignore threatens to grow into a tide and his pulse picks up, drumming in his neck. 

The arresting uncertainty does not last for very long. Hands entwined between his knees, Flint begins to slowly twist the ring on his pinkie finger. Resuming the pensive motion he clearly only paused in when he heard Silver coming down the hall. 

 _Your days of approaching unannounced are behind you._  It's as much of an invitation as Silver is ever going to get. 

"You look like hell," Silver says. The ship groans around them, rolling over a wave. Flint does not look up. 

Silver steels himself and steps into the hold. "This is foolish," he says, eyes catching on the untouched plate of bread and dried apples left discarded at Flint's feet. "We will be making landfall in less than two days, provided the weather holds. You have to gather your strength. You'll need it once we get there. I don't see how starving yourself will help on that score."

The stifling quiet amplifies the sound of Silver's crutch as he makes his way towards the cannons strapped to the opposite wall. His leg aches, still, like it has been ceaselessly since the island. Iron screeches beneath him in protest when he leans back into the cannons to ease his weight off of it. The pain barely lessens, barbing relentlessly into his spine. 

Flint does not respond, gives no indication that he is even listening, which in of itself is an indication that he is. The top of his head is incredulous enough, somehow, for Silver to press on.

"We _will_ get there. Savannah. If the plan were to kill you I would have done so on the island. If the plan were to placate you with an elaborate lie, I think you'll agree that there is nothing further to be gained by continuing the ruse." 

Flint only continues to spin the ring, though the motion appears a shade more agitated than before. Silver realises that he's gauging all changes in Flint's posture with a kind of focus that is suddenly alarming. Another force of habit he will need go outgrow. He tears his gaze away from Flint's hands and looks at the ceiling as he makes his final point.

"Eliminate those two options and you are left only with the truth. Provided you will let yourself believe it. Thomas Hamilton is alive, and I am taking you to him."

"Why are you here?" 

Convinced it would look too much like startlement, Silver does not let his eyes shift downwards at the sound of Flint's voice. He watches the displaced dust around the rafters above, instead, swirling in the air as men walk overhead. 

"Ben mentioned you were refusing your rations," Silver says. His voice is too hoarse. 

Flint's is horrifyingly flat. "So?" 

"So, I'd really rather you not _die_. Not now, not when we’re so close."  

“Close to what, exactly?”

To peace. To _him_.

It sticks in Silver’s throat in the way that truth only ever does. Flint still doesn’t believe him. Won't believe him, until he sees for himself; Thomas in the flesh, alive and bright and loving and whole. 

By then it'll be too late, though Silver's not exactly sure for what. 

Relenting in the pressing silence, Silver chances a glance down and Flint is still staring at his hands. His fingers have stilled around the ring.  _Look at me_ , Silver wants to say. To snarl, to _beg_. It's on the tip of his tongue, caught in his gritted teeth.  _Fucking look at me._

"I've had a lot of time to think," Flint says, abruptly. "About what it is you have accomplished here. The gravity of our situation. The implications of the choices you have made." 

His voice is deceptively light. Absent, even, though rough from disuse. It makes the hairs on the back of Silver's neck stand on end; his whole body suddenly hanging on the edge of a knife. He resists the urge to prompt Flint into continuing. There was courting danger and there was leaping headfirst into it; Silver has always been just brave enough for the former and just a little too smart for the latter. 

"The opportunity for quiet reflection rarely presents itself to me,” Flint muses, kitting his hands together. Lights swing overhead, drenching him in darkness one moment and reflecting the sheen of sweat on his temples the next. “I suppose I have you to thank for that. A great many things have revealed themselves, these past few days. Chief among them being that I was wrong in my judgment of you." 

Silver is busy flitting through a mental catalogue of all the instances that Flint has ever been wrong about him - and there's decidedly too many, Silver would need his other foot to count them all - when one of Flint’s hands moves up to tug at his beard, gently. The thoughtful gesture is so familiar that Silver’s stomach twists, arresting all other thought. Another thing he will remember, down the line. An endless archive of a dead man’s habits. The ship rolls again, the incoming tide cradling the hull like a lover, and Silver feels himself sway, though not entirely due to the state of the sea.

Flint’s eyes are still glued to the floor as he speaks. "I was convinced, for a long time, that at some uncertain point in your past you must have experienced a loss that was… _unfathomable_ in its greatness, even to me. The kind that did not bear repeating, that you could not bear repeating. One that paralysed you with fear, taught you to violently recoil from even a distant hypothetical of further loss. There was a kinship, I think, in that. I saw myself reflected in you, perhaps. The imagined parallel nature of our pain. I was too ready to believe that. To trust that." 

As ever, Flint's voice is hypnotic when it gets like this. More so than usual, given the fact that Silver has gone without it for close to a week. He feels off-kilter with it, unable to right himself in the moment. Cannot for the life of him digest fast enough the words hanging in the air. And so he is still playing a game of ridiculous catch up, thinking only of  _kinship_ and  _parallel_ and  _trust_ when Flint says, voice distant, and detached, and _damning_ , "I know now that I was mistaken. You have never known loss. For all your talk of being liked _,_ you have never known _love_ , which is a predicate to knowing loss. You have never known anything." 

Moments ago, Silver hadn't been sure what he would prefer to find in Flint's eyes once they lifted to meet his own. Rage, perhaps. It was always warm and comfortable to be on the receiving end of Flint's rage. Silver would have greeted it as if it were an old friend he hadn't seen in years, would have let his own fury flare in response. It would have been easy. It would have been _kind_. 

Flint has never been either quite so generously, or at the same time. He looks up and his green eyes are empty; quiet, like the deck of a ship with the plague. Impassive. A death sentence. 

"Eat," Silver says. He doesn’t recognise his own voice. He cannot feel his hands, but he knows they have curled into fists. "You need to _eat_." 

“Your past has revealed itself to me,” Flint murmurs, staring unaffected as if Silver has not spoken. His cheeks are gaunt, skeletal in the light. “That brings some measure of comfort, though belated. Knowing that despite your insistence to the contrary, your history has impacted you as surely as my own has impacted me. Knowing _you_ , finally, so that I can begin to make sense of what you have done.”

There had been a time where Silver believed his and Flint’s skills of oration were comparable. Their shared ability to weave words into whatever form they pleased; warm embraces one moment and sharp barbs the next, gentle nudges unfolding into horrifying threats that served always to move men towards a preferred course of action. But in _this_ , Silver knows now, Flint is singular. The terrifying efficiency with which Flint is able to take Silver apart with words alone; the careful, measured consideration--bordering on reverence--with which he does it, every single time. A league entirely of his own.

As it is, with the way Silver's leg threatens to tremble beneath him, he can only repay Flint with a poor imitation of it, now. 

“You have never known war, have you?”

Flint’s brow furrows gently in the dim light with something akin to indignance. “I’m sorry?”

“War,” Silver says again, in the same low and colourless voice he cannot control. He grips his crutch tighter, his knuckles going white over it. “That’s it, isn’t it? I’ve never known love and you’ve never known war. Such is the difference between us.”

Flint draws back in confusion, his elbows sliding off of his knees as he goes. He looks to be edging towards irritation, as if he’s about to speak, to say something devastating, so Silver cuts him off.

“ _No_ ," Silver says, more sharply than he intends to. "I don’t mean war with a sword strapped to your belt and a gun in your hands and an army at your back. I mean scared and hiding and dying and losing, inescapably,  _helplessly_ , no matter which side is victorious. You’ve been at war your entire life, I know that, but I also suspect you’ve never been in _that_ kind of war.”

A level pause, before comprehension sinks into Flint like a stone, barely leaving a ripple behind in his features.

“And you have?”

It is clear he asks the question only out of formality. The terror that brings is singular, too.

“Yes, I have,” Silver says, with a voice only reserved for truth. It is rough from disuse. Something breaks loose in his chest and he realises he is trembling. “And there is no cause noble enough to warrant that level of death and destruction. I refuse to sacrifice a _single fucking thing_ that I love at its altar. For what it’s worth, you’re right. I came from nothing and I had nothing and I knew _nothing_ and now I have—too much—more than I know what to fucking _do_ with. But I refuse to let my story end with loss. I refuse to bury the things I love when I have fought so hard to love them. You can hate me for it. You can _hate_ me. I will take comfort in the fact that you are alive to fucking hate me.”

Flint’s expression has shifted, into something carefully guarded that Silver can’t bear to look at. Before he knows what he’s doing he is standing again, grief and guilt and  _shame_ broiling low and so hot in his belly that he has to move around to keep himself from shaking. He wants to leave the room, to leave Flint, to breathe _air_. Avoiding Flint’s gaze, he takes several steps towards the door, his throat so dry that he cannot even gasp, when;

“I don’t.”

Silver freezes, facing away.

“I don’t…hate you,” Flint repeats, slowly, as if he’s testing the words out on his tongue. “That is the problem. _Another_ problem. One I’ve tried to resolve for as long as we’ve been on this godforsaken ship, going fuck knows where. I’ve found myself unable to reconcile that conviction with all the reasons that I should want to kill you where you stand. All that you have done. All that you have taken from me. From Madi. From her people. From our people. What your fear has cost us all.”

It’s a coward’s way out, but Silver does not dare turn around. He does not know what he will find when he looks back, and he would rather stay ignorant of it, for as long as he is able. 

“I’ve _tried_ ,” Flint says. It escapes him on an exhale, and he sounds so tired Silver’s own back aches with it. “I’ve tried, and I should. Hate you. But that is another thing I know, now. I could never hate you. You would do well to remember that. Going forward. Wherever we go, the both of us."

Another curse. Silver wants to unhear it, like the first. 

“As I said," Flint sighs, chains clinking in the silence as he shifts in his seat. “A lot of things are clearer to me than they were, before. And still, there is one thing I have not yet been able to make sense of. It has been hounding me, and I would like it to be resolved. Here, at the end of all things, if you would indulge me with some truth." 

Perspiration is still clinging to Silver's forehead and yet his blood runs cold, ice expanding in the cavernous hollow of his chest like breaking glass. He knows what Flint is about to say before he says it, but cannot catch his breath in time to interrupt.

“Why didn't you kill me?” Flint asks. 

When Silver was young, barely nine years old and already too sharp for his own good, Sister Margaret used to say that God lived in the quiet. In the spaces between words, the moments between breaths. God chose to let himself be known there, and one needed only to listen to hear him speak. This, of course, was a lesson in virtue. Intended to impart upon young and impressionable minds the importance of holding one’s tongue. Encourage some sense of prudence and patience and contemplation, probably. To Silver, it had been a lesson in something entirely different; that God could not show up to judge you if you never gave him the room to speak.

But Silver does not think he could fill the current silence stretching out around him if his life depended on it. The devil-tongued swindler who talked too much and by turns terrorised and infuriated and entertained everyone he ever met seems as distant to Silver as a stranger. In his place is a young man, old before his time and tired of being sharp, tired of being too smart for God. 

At a loss for what to say, Silver turns his head to see in his periphery that Flint is staring at him, blinking green and patiently waiting for an answer; and Flint knows everything, still somehow knows _nothing._

It’s maddening. Silver wants to _shake_ him, wants to shake apart himself. Flint’s persistent and stubborn ignorance is what moves him to speak, finally.

“Why did you kill Dooley?" he counters over his shoulder. "Have you not been listening? We refuse to bury the things we love.”

It hits Flint slowly. His guarded expression unwinds like a pool of rope spilling to the ground, and he begins to blink with an entirely different realisation. Without waiting for a response, Silver turns and tips clumsily forward using his crutch, falling to rest on his knee at Flint’s feet. Pain radiates from Silver’s leg all the way up into his neck, but it’s only fleeting, when compared. The chains shift again when Flint shudders with an aborted flinch, hands half-way out as if he intended to catch Silver on the way down. They hover in the air, outstretched, on either side of Silver’s face and the urge to lean into Flint’s palms one way or the other is unspeakably great. The desire to feel Flint’s skin again and lose himself, for a final time, pulls as surely as the moon pulls the tide.

He cannot afford to be lost right now. Cannot afford to drown when Flint is drowning. Another force of habit. One he will not outgrow.

Silver grasps blindly around the floor, gaze still locked with Flint’s. He is regarding Silver with a peculiar expression, eyes wide and solemn, filled with equal parts hesitation and something that looks like awe. Silver’s hand closes around the plate of food, the dried apples, and he brings one up to Flint’s eye-line.

Silver manages to say, too quiet for God but loud enough to be heard in the small space between them;

“Eat.  _Please_.”

That’s all he manages to say.

A long pause, before the chains shift again. Flint acquiesces, lifting the apple slice from Silver's hand.

Silver watches him eat. Flint watches Silver breathe. 

Silver could shake with relief. Odysseus cannot die before he goes home. What kind of story would that be?

* * *

To say that Ben Gunn has been having a difficult day would be a gross understatement. He's been having a difficult month. An impossible fucking year.

And now, on top of everything he has had to contend with, on top of the bone-deep exhaustion that will not leave him no matter how long he sleeps or drinks, the living nightmares that plague his waking moments, the grief that will not let up, Ben has been tasked by Jack fucking Rackham to locate exactly where John Silver has disappeared off to for the last few hours.

Ben does not care. Honestly, he couldn't give less of a shit if he tried. But Jack stares at him, uncompromising, sideburns twitching over his uncharacteristically clenched jaw, and Ben relents like a sail being unfurled under the weight of it. Sets off to find the wayward quartermaster turned Pirate King turned nothing, as he has been asked to do. 

He knows exactly where to look, truth be told. As soon as he’d delivered the news to Silver that Flint had stopped eating, Ben had an inkling of what the man was planning to do. And sure enough, when he finally gets below deck the door to the hold stands ajar, though just a sliver. The sight that meets him when he peeks an inquisitive eye through is a strange one. Not at all what he expected to find. He does not know quite what to make of it, much less how on earth to deliver the news of it to Jack. 

In the darkness of the room, Flint is unshackled. Chains cast off to the side, glinting in a heap next to Silver’s crutch. Silver, for his part, is sitting on the floor, leaning against the barrel between Flint’s legs. His head is resting on Flint’s knee.

Above him, Flint is slumped over to his side against the hull of the ship. His arms are draped over Silver’s shoulders like a wreath, one hand loosely curled around Silver's neck.

They are both asleep. Drawing breath in unison, rocking gently against one another with every roll of the ship. 

At a loss, Ben backs away. He edges the door shut with a quiet tug as he goes.

Ben stares hard at the wood, as if it could give him some guidance on how to proceed. He decides, eventually, that he can find it in himself to look for Silver elsewhere for just a little while longer. 

**Author's Note:**

> Well, there. I don't know. I'm sorry. 
> 
> I now recognise that this has turned into some sort of parallel companion piece to it's you, it's still you. I guess this will be Tattoo!Verse from now on. Soft and sad always.


End file.
